Isabella Moon (41 page)

“Why six months?” Janet said. “You keep telling me that. Why not now?”

Charlie Matter smiled. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “Won’t be long before the bees start waking up. Winter was hard on the hives this year.”

Janet got into the Range Rover. Her cell phone buzzed with a message, but she ignored it. “Pig,” she muttered as she watched Charlie Matter swagger his way toward the orchard where the co-op kept its beehives. There was a part of her, far down inside, that hated men. All men. Manipulative bastards, every one of them. Richard hadn’t quite been the exception, but he’d been sympathetic to her needs. He had seemed to delight in letting her have her way, and she’d known instinctively when she shouldn’t push him. Compared to Richard, other men were just plain small.

As Charlie Matter disappeared behind one of the greenhouses, she threw the Rover into reverse and backed up fast, coming within inches of one of the coop’s rusting vans. Still cursing Charlie Matter’s obstinance, she put the Rover in drive and sped down the co-op’s rutted road, the Rover taking the bumps as though they weren’t even there.

In how many dreams would she relive that moment, that hideous, shuddering moment when she saw a flash of yellow appear and quickly disappear just at the front right corner of the Rover, and felt the silent (yes, it was silent), easy breaking of something beneath the Rover’s right front tire? It might have been a long branch or a berm of gravel or even an unlucky fox. She slammed on the brakes, afraid to look behind her.

Pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease let it have been a fox or a tree limb—but somehow she knew it hadn’t been. Her life paused in that moment, suspended in the knowledge that she’d done something irreconcilable, irretrievable. The cell phone was ringing, but she didn’t hear it. She was listening for something else, but there was only silence beyond the unconcerned rumble of the Rover’s engine.

It is the nature of some people to immediately rush toward their mistakes, to confront them right away as though sudden action might erase them or dull the consequences. Such a thing wasn’t at all in Janet. Despite her aggressive business reputation, she was a very careful person. A quick study, she always gathered all the information she could before she made a decision. Before she even approached what looked like a bright pile of rags in the road behind the idling Rover, she noted that she had rounded a curve and was well hidden from the co-op’s buildings; neither was she in sight of the highway or the farm’s entrance. She could also see that the thing in the road was a child, the dark-haired girl who had answered Charlie Matter’s door on one of her visits.

“Little girl,” she whispered. Was that her own voice that shook like a frightened old woman’s? “Little girl.”

She knelt beside the child, bits of gravel from the road digging into her knees. She touched the girl’s shoulder, which seemed to be in the wrong place, just a couple of inches off. But the girl didn’t move. Her dark eyes stared up at the naked branches of the trees above them and her mouth was open a bit.

Unable to look away from her soft, motionless face, Janet felt around for the girl’s hand. “Please don’t be dead,” Janet said. “Please, God, don’t be dead.”

There was no pulse in the wrist, which seemed to Janet to be the size of a doll’s. In her adult life, she’d never touched a child like this. There had been no time for children.

Janet saw, in her mind’s eye, the events to come. In fewer than five seconds she saw the ambulance, the police cars, the television cameras, the courtroom, Charlie Matter accusing, accusing, accusing, the hours alone in her room, the stares of the people who had once been her friends, the horrid loneliness. No. She opened the Range Rover’s rear door.

The child was light in her arms. She had to bend the girl’s knees slightly to get her to fit in the width of the Rover’s rear compartment. A faint, putrid odor of urine came from inside the girl’s coat, making Janet gag. Glancing over her shoulder, she checked to see that no splash of blood or errant hair ribbon lay on the road to hint at what had just occurred. Still, though, the girl’s eyes were open. Janet grabbed the wool picnic blanket she kept in the Rover for emergencies and hurriedly tucked it around the girl’s body and over her face.

As she drove back toward town and to her house, her hands shaking so badly that she was afraid she might steer into the opposite lane, her mind raced to think what she would do next. It wasn’t until she arrived home and was shutting the garage door behind the Rover that she knew she would call Paxton, who was her friend, her confidant, her sometimes lover, whom she’d known and cared for (in her own way) since long before she’d married Richard. Paxton would understand.

Janet knew she’d made a mistake going after Kate when she came upon her walking south of town.
What if she’d succeeded in running her down? It would’ve happened all over again!
She simply hadn’t been herself since the sheriff found the girl’s bones where Paxton had buried them. She’d been blinded by hate and, worse, fear when she’d seen Kate. If Kate had never shown up in Carystown, no one would ever have known that the child was even dead.

But she might’ve driven right past Kate—maybe just easing toward her the slightest bit to scare her—if it hadn’t been for their argument about Caleb. It wasn’t her fault that he wouldn’t stop bothering her, that he was so pussy-whipped by Little Miss Kate that he couldn’t deal with his own guilt and had to pick at it, pick at
her,
until he felt better. Just as it hadn’t been her fault that the Moon girl was walking almost in the middle of the road where anyone could’ve hit her. But if none of it was her fault, why couldn’t she escape the weight of it all? Why couldn’t she step out of the shower a clean and guiltless woman? It had been two years,
for God’s sake,
since the girl’s death. Why wouldn’t it go away?

Above the sound of the water, she heard Paxton’s knock on the bathroom door. When she didn’t answer, he let himself in. She could see the outline of his body through the thick glass of the shower wall. What did it matter that he’d murdered Lillian? He was her only friend.

“Can I come in with you?” Paxton said, sounding like a boy pleading for a treat. “Or do you want to be alone?”

Alone. No, not ever again!
When she had first heard about Kate’s experience with the ghost of Isabella Moon, she was puzzled that it was Kate being haunted and not she. Then again, she knew that she didn’t need some nighttime visitation to remind her of what she’d done. It was the silence she remembered that frightened her.

44

“
BILL,” MARGARET SAID,
jostling him awake to take the telephone. “It’s Daphne.”

“I’m here,” Bill said. He took the phone from Margaret and looked at the clock to see that it was after seven-thirty in the morning. It was a hell of a way to start the day, not even hearing the telephone.

“Hey, Sheriff,” Daphne said. “The state called. They won’t be able to get their guys down here until tomorrow. Some paperwork screwup.”

“Not on our part, I hope,” Bill said.

Daphne gave an irritated snort. “Not likely,” she said. “I faxed it right up there like you told me.”

“Don’t get up on your dignity, Daphne. It’s too early for attitude.”

“That’s not all,” she said, ignoring him. “That Lucy from the mayor’s office is all over the voice mail this morning because she read about Delmar Johnston in the paper. She wants you to call her.”

“What do they say over at the hospital?” Bill asked.

“No change. Still comatose,” Daphne said. “You won’t guess what took him out.”

“Quit with the games,” Bill said.

“They think it might be rat poison,” she said. “How weird is that? It’s not like you can get high from it. And we sure don’t keep it around the cells.”

Bill wasn’t happy to hear about the poison. He’d been hoping that Johnston’s illness had been caused by food poisoning, or maybe smuggled-in drugs. The poison put a whole new complexion on things.

“Make sure that search warrant for the Birkenshaw place is handy, and double-check that it covers the main house. I’m going out there today. I’ll be in the office in fifteen minutes,” Bill said.

“But the troopers can’t come until tomorrow.”

“Step over to the prosecutor’s office and make sure we’ve got a valid one for tomorrow as well. And where’s Mitch?” he said.

“Right here,” Daphne said. “You want to talk to him?”

“No,” Bill said. “Just tell him to hang around until I get there.”

“You don’t think you’re rushing this, going out to the Birkenshaws’?” Margaret said when Bill got down to the kitchen. “You’ve got half the state police coming tomorrow.”

He was secretly relieved to get the state involved, though it made him look like a piker. There was just too damn much on his plate. And it was looking like he had that asshole Paxton Birkenshaw to thank for most of it.

“I don’t choose the criminals,” he said. “Mrs. Birkenshaw’s no doubt a good woman, but her son needs to be locked up, and the sooner the better.”

Margaret slid a banana and a glass of orange juice across the counter to him. But she pressed her lips together in a way that told Bill she wasn’t finished.

“I just think—” she said.

“You’ve got to let go of this, Margaret,” Bill told her. “This isn’t 1968 and Millar P. Birkenshaw doesn’t own the town or all the judges anymore. And his son doesn’t get to do whatever the hell he wants just because he always has. Carystown isn’t the same town you grew up in.”

“You actually think that I want Paxton Birkenshaw to get away with breaking the law for sentimental reasons?” Margaret said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

Bill was tired of the distance between them, and he hated to see the hurt, angry look in his wife’s eyes.

“You know better than that,” he said. “You just need to be realistic.”

“And you just go ahead and dig that hole deeper,” she said. She turned and went upstairs. Her footsteps quickly crossed the hallway above his head, and Bill heard the bedroom door shut. Margaret never slammed doors, but he could always tell the difference when she was irritated.

He wanted to follow her. He knew he’d been too hard on her. She loved Carystown and couldn’t bear to see big-city troubles messing it up. But right now he needed to make a phone call to Frank that he wasn’t looking forward to.

The news about Delmar Johnston only supported his suspicions about Mitch, who had been at the jail, cleaning up some paperwork, around the time Johnston was poisoned. Mitch was a show-off, always living way above his means, and while Bill had never imagined that he would stoop to attempted murder, he had a hunch and knew he had to follow it. The botched tire impression bugged him, too. Was it possible that Mitch was covering for Birkenshaw?

“Sure,” Frank said when Bill told him what he wanted. “I can’t say I’ll be happy to do it, but if you’re sure, we’ll be there.”

“I hope I’m wrong,” Bill said. “Maybe we can all have a good laugh about it later. I’ll give you a ring on your cell when I’ve got the time nailed down.”

Bill took his time on the way out west of town. A misty rain fell on the windshield and put a shine on the asphalt. Whenever he was on the road and saw other officers driving, or even troopers, they seemed to be in a hurry, flashing lights or no. The truth be told, he wasn’t anxious to get out to Bonterre. There would be trouble with the old lady if Birkenshaw himself were there.

Mitch sat in the passenger seat talking on his cell phone, trying to put off some young thing from up in Lexington. The girl shouldn’t have had his department cell phone number, but there it was. Bill knew that he’d been too lax all along with Mitch and the other younger deputies. They acted like kids sometimes, not much better than the underage ones they occasionally busted for buying booze. Mitch was a particular disappointment, and Bill blamed himself.

“Sorry,” Mitch said, flipping the phone shut. “What is it about a woman that makes her think because you’re out of her sight, you’re in somebody else’s bed?”

Bill wanted to ask if that wasn’t usually a pretty safe guess, but he didn’t.

“What’s up with the Cayley case?” he said instead. There was no sense in tipping Mitch to his suspicions about Birkenshaw, especially if he was involved.

“You saw the coroner’s report,” Mitch said. “Looks like maybe a tool got her first. Maybe a tire iron?”

“What about the daughter?”

“Francie?” Mitch said. “Her alibi’s a little sloppy, but I’m trying to imagine what would make a nice girl like her want to stick her mother with a pitchfork after whacking her on the head. That’s some nasty shit.”

“Any sign that she has a substance problem? Or did you look into that?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I just don’t see it. She’s got a steady job. The neighbors said she was pretty close to her mother.”

“Just asking,” Bill said.

“So, are you saying you want me to look at her harder?” Mitch said, defensive. “Is that what this is about?”

“Whoa,” Bill said. “I’m only looking to find out who killed the woman. You handle the case how you see fit.”

Mitch didn’t reply, but Bill knew he’d gotten to him.